subscriptions de-activating on upgrade to Membership 2

Since upgrading to Membership 2 pro, many of my subscriptions have been de-activating even though they're paid up in Paypal. It looks like PayPal Express is no longer a payment gateway and that might be the issue. But I'd prefer not to have to cancel each recurring payment, manually activate each subscription, then ask them to resubscribe once their membership is expired.

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Does this happend just after the update to Membership 2 pro, or just to new version? Can you check the transactions logs for the payment gateway.
Could you also grant support access I would like to see your settings. You can grant support access via WPMU DEV > Support > Support Access > Grant Access.

The plugin developer will reply here ASAP but just want to chime in here to help you which i hope you don't mind.

Since upgrading to Membership 2 pro, many of my subscriptions have been de-activating even though they're paid up in Paypal.

So many subscriptions deactivated but not all?

So is there anything common in those subscriptions which are getting deactivated?

Is that still happening for new subscriptions?

After new subscription is it deactivated immediately or after some time?

Please answer all of the above questions so that i can troubleshoot the issue.

Also it seems the support staff access is revoked on your site so could you please regrant it so that we can troubleshoot it?

It looks like PayPal Express is no longer a payment gateway and that might be the issue.

In the latest Membership 2 Pro plugin the following two payment gatways are supported.

PayPal Single Gateway
This the a basic PayPal gateway that allows your members to easily make a single payment.
If you use this gateway for recurring payments then your members have to confirm each recuring payment individually.

PayPal Standard Gateway
This is the advanced PayPal gateway will handle all payment types, including trial periods and recurring payments. However, it should not be used for permanent type meberships, as here it will display "pay again after 5 years" during checkout.

This is a bug, and the developer currently put very much effort on fixing this. This issue because the Membership Pro PayPal IPN doesn't have enough data for Membership 2. So when the Membership 2 received the IPN, it will trigger error. Error: No invoice or custom data specified.

can you give us some quick infos on how your members pay their subscriptions?
What I see in your transaction logs is a lot of people that make manual payments in PayPal, i.e.:

"Payment received; source is the Send Money tab on the PayPal website"

But none of them used the checkout page to sign up for a real subscription.
It's really hard/almost impossible to match those manual payments with an invoice and I'm not sure if we want to do this at all (since manual payments might be directed to other services and are usually not linked with the Membership plugin; imagine people paying you for an ebay sale and suddenly they have an paid Membership account on your website...)

Details about one of those transactions is attached as screenshot. You'll see the transaction type "send_money", which means the user logged into PayPal and clicked the "Send money" button instead of using a checkout form on your page. Also you notice that the only way to identify the invoice is by reading the memo that the user manually typed into the form in PayPal. Of course everyone will type something else in there, so we cannot always reliably find an invoice.

This kind of transaction is currently classified as "Manual Payment" in M2. Which means you'll actually review you PayPal account and then mark the invoices as paid that were directly paid via PayPal... Currently the best solution I can offer is to ask your members to use the checkout page to sign up for a recurring payment plan. Is this possible in your case?

I don't know how to change that, though. I just have the Paypal Standard gateway set up. It sounds like a system error if it's doing that. When people sign up they are creating a recurring payment...but the system apparently doesn't recognize it.

about the payments there are 2 things to note:
1.) Subscribers that use the checkout page now (in M2) are okay; their payments are correctly processed by the plugin.
2.) Subscribers that created a manual subscription plan inside PayPal before you upgraded to M2 cannot be processed by the plugin...

I know that point 2 is a bit annoying; honestly I don't know why this is happening - maybe PayPal changed some details. Or you run a different website where users make manual payments?

Here's the only options I can think of how to handle this:
A) Tell the users* that make these manual payments to cancel the subscription and re-subscribe using the checkout page.
B) Leave them as they are but check the Billings page frequently and mark their invoices** as paid.

* You should be able to identify users by the email address (or firstname/lastname) specified by PayPal.
** If the subscription was imported then it's possible that you don't see any invoices for the user, since the invoice usually is created when a payment is registered. If the user has no invoices you can manually create the invoice in the Billings page.

Btw: We're preparing an update for M2 that is planned for beginning of next week. Among the changes are several improvements to the Transaction Log with more information and making the data more readable.
With this update installed I can check your transaction logs again to see if I can find some new details that would allow us to automatically process these payments. Feel free to send a reminder after you installed the update and I'll have another look :slight_smile:

Here's a perfect example to fix. A user named "jillk" just signed up. New Wordpress account. Paid through the site via Paypal. But Membership 2 didn't give her a subscription. I had to manually create it for her. And it seems like I'll have to manually renew it each month. Please check that out on my site (support access is granted) and help me figure out what's going wrong.

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